The present invention relates to a moving picture coding apparatus with total data amount control.
There is a conventional moving picture coding apparatus with total data amount control. The conventional apparatus carries out twice coding operations in the total data amount control. High efficiently encoded data of data amount suitable for storage capacity of a storage medium to store the encoded data is output from the coding apparatus at a variable rate.
In the first coding operation, encoded data amount of a video signal is checked to decide a target data transfer rate and a target data amount with respect to the storage medium. In the second coding operation, the video signal is again encoded by a quantization scale corrected based on the target data amount. The encoded data whose amount is changed to the target amount is stored into a buffer memory. The stored encoded data is outputted from the buffer memory at the target transfer rate.
The conventional apparatus, however, does not check the encoded data amount in the second coding operation. Therefore, the conventional apparatus has a disadvantage in that the encoded data amount outputted from the buffer memory, in the second coding operation, is not necessarily suitable for the storage capacity of the storage medium. Further, picture quality of the video signal to be reproduced from the storage medium depends on the data sufficiency of the buffer memory.